Abstract
Location-based services (LBS) have gained huge popularity because of the easy availability of modern mobile devices and the fast development of geographical information science (GIS). However, the lack of protection for private user positions might give rise to privacy concerns. This kind of problem is especially serious in mobile application environment because many mobile applications tend to use LBS. In this paper, we propose a new privacy preserving approach using customized robust cloaked region (RCR), depending on a peer-to-peer structure and the premise that users do not trust each other when sharing their geographical locations. Two algorithms are used to generate the RCR with high user density. The area of the RCR is controlled by the user’s demanded degree of protection. To enhance the resistance to regional background knowledge attack, we incorporate a location semantic value into each unit of the user map. According to extensive simulations, our method can effectively obfuscate a user’s geographical location into a highly indistinguishable region because of the disturbance of nearby users and different equally possible locations.
Highlights
With the development of the geographical information science (GIS) technique and the popularity of mobile devices, location-based services (LBS) have been widely employed
To address the abovementioned drawbacks when applying spatial obfuscation, this paper introduces a new approach using customized robust cloaked region (RCR)
E major contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows: (i) We propose the idea of replacing the precise position with a cloaked region when sharing location information in the peer-to-peer structure, which greatly reduces the risk of privacy breach
Summary
With the development of the geographical information science (GIS) technique and the popularity of mobile devices, location-based services (LBS) have been widely employed. Among all solutions to geographical location preserving, spatial obfuscation has been proved the most effective one It deliberately generalizes the user’s precise position into a region, so that adversaries can only retrieve a coarse location. Gruteser and Grunwald [1] firstly defined k-anonymity in the context of spatial obfuscation Several methods such as the Casper framework presented by Mokbel et al [2] and the nearest neighbor cloak and the Hilbert cloak proposed by Kalnis et al [3] are TTP-based. E proposed approach is based on a P2P structure and designed to address the privacy concern raised by sharing accurate positions. (i) We propose the idea of replacing the precise position with a cloaked region when sharing location information in the peer-to-peer structure, which greatly reduces the risk of privacy breach. (iv) Extensive experiments are performed with realworld data, and the results have validated the correctness and superiority of the proposed approach and algorithm
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